Finance and Business

Assembling Teams of Reps and Keeping Them Sharp

Sales managers engage in eight central tasks in their search to develop a “world class” sales organization. These tasks have remained constant for many years. They can ne though of as a combination of people-management and process-management skills.

Managers beign by recruiting, screening, and hiring reps. Task 2 involves training reps and readying them for sales asignments. Task 3 requires the manager to deploy the rep to cover markets, accounts, and geographic territority. The remaining five managerial tasks relate to the field: supervision, measurement of rep results, performance feedback and evaluation, compensation and rep incentives, and promotion of reps into managerial jobs or higher-level sales responsibilities.

With more volative crowded markets, smarters customers are demanding solutions, and with more consolidated sophisticated reseller companies, reps have changed. In the face of such changes, the old sales management task model must be updated. While reps are still recruited and hired, more of them are now college graduates, and more of them are women. Thus, selection of reps is more varied, with higher-level skills being sought.

Training is no longer as operative a descripter of managerial actions as is rep development. As one astute manager once remarked, “your train animals, you develop people.” Reps must be developed as specialists and as team players, since so much of selling is now a team effort. Deployment of reps to territories or accounts is today more complex, since some accounts ae handled by telesales personnel, some by national account reps, and others by rep teams composed of market, product, or applications specialists all working in concert. The sales manager learns to be a network manager, astute at team building and deployment as well as individual account or territory assignments.

Great Sales Force Coaching

Since coaching sales reps can be stressful and difficult, let’s take a close loot at what for a great coach, and what constitutes excellent coaching. Successful field coaching of reps requires that sales managers recognize three preconditions.

• First, the manager must set aside time for coaching. Some expert believe that in typical sales management position, 75% of the manager’s time should be spent in the field coaching reps.
• Second, to be truly effective, most coaching must be done individually with reps, in sessions that last from thirty-five to forty-five minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities minutes and take place immediately prior to or following rep activities with customers. This make the coaching more relevant and timely.

Coaching that is delayed or out of sync with applicable situation is not nearly so effective. Although certain amount of coaching of sales reps in a group setting is possible, most coaching of reps should be tailored to the individual to reflect the operating realities of different reps, customer sets, and distributors in a territory.

Third, the benefits of coaching are not truly realized until trust has been established between sales manager and rep. coaching involves confronting problems. Unless trust is present, the rep being coached may not feel the manager has earned the right to be as firm and direct as the situation requires. The manager’s authority is not sufficient in itself to ensure that genuine coaching session will occur.

The sales manager shouldn’t dominate a coaching session. Yet this frequently occurs in the absence of trust. Because trust involves shared values and experiences, developing a relationship takes time. Sales managers must recognize the time-consuming nature of trust building.
A great coach performs several key roles for sales reps :
The instructor-teacher role. Sales managers should help reps integrate what they learned in the classroom about products or selling skills with what their experience is teaching the “in the street.” A sales manager can provide quality instruction to reps, on the spot, before o after sales calls about :
- How to probe for genuine customer needs.
- How to categorize customers by sales potential, in ways that make the rep smarter  in qualifying business prospects or more able to typify the key buying influences in an account. Customer categorization help reps stay organized. They can more readily use their accumulated knowledge of what works for customers.
- How to study and categorize competitors. Sales managers who teach reps to better understand competitors are providing them with information useful in setting sales goals in the midst of changing competition in the local territory. Reps covering key urban territories are often subject to more aggressive and numerous competitive maneuvers than are reps in larger, rural territories.
- How to optimally lay out routing plans for customer call cycles, depeding on various accounts’ sales volumes and territory. The manager can guide reps in defining “A.” “B” or “C” target accounts, then help the rep determine feasible call schedules.
- Sales managers can provide quality instruction on what the rep can do to achieve desirable outcomes. Managers can be dispassionate about which approaches work best and/or how these can be finetuned. This improves a sales rep’s adaptive selling skills. Often a manager accompanying a rep can see ways for the rep to improve his of her handling of customer objections of to improve closing techniques. Teaching reps self-assessment skills is a vital part of a coach’s role.

Meaningful Coaching and Leadership of Sales Professional

Peter Drucker has said that outstanding organizations only succeed when “commond people achieve uncommon performance.” This was never more true  than for sales management. While it would be nice to believe that sales managers could groom all superstar sales reps, in fact, most have a mix of performance levels on their sales team.

Sales stars often overachieve regardless of coaching or compensation. But getting the average reps, who often compromise 60% of a typical sales force, to perform better makes the biggest difference in a team`s soverall results. To coax outstanding performance from the team, excellent sales managers learn to raise the performance “bar” so that their people have to strech their talents to get over it. But they can not raise the bar to such a height that the performance standard is well beyond the abilities of their people.

Spotting and developing of talented reps can go a long way to ensure that the average proficiency level of a sales rep force improves each year. Combining this blend or reps with astute modern computer-based deployment tactics assures the company that market opportunity matching is optimum.

But coaching reps requires a great deal more than assembling a team and setting up customers assignments in an efficient, sensible fashion. If that is all any team needed to do to win, the teams with the most talent would always win, and certainly those that combined high talent with great game plans would dominate all other teams. In real life, of course, that is not the case. Teams with great game plans often lose. And teams stacked with talent often perform below par and are beaten by rivals with less raw talent who are simply better motivated and coached.

In business, a great ‘field coach” in sales can be just as important to defeating competitors for market share as a sports coach is in winning a championship pennat. Sports teams with outstanding records in variably have superior coaching. And behind most succesfull sales organizations are superior district and national managers who know how to manage both human and business needs.